Continue reading »]]> Many of us are just old enough to remember the UPS commercial about the company that launched their new online store.  The handful of entrepreneurs cheered as they saw the first orders come in.  When the orders picked up and number more than 100, they screamed. Then 1000 orders…unbelievable. Then, as the numbers continued to grow, the mood became somber? Now what do they do?

That same scenario applies equally today. You’ve built your new Magento eCommerce site. It’s branded to reflect your company image, SEO is effectively in place and you’re getting great visibility and traffic. Orders are coming in, you’re getting paid. But what happens when the calls start coming for support? How will you manage customer requests that can’t be managed in 5 minutes or less and require follow up? What about return requests? What if the caller is a reseller who has special terms and price lists that the call center agent needs to know about when they answer?

These are all key needs that products like SugarCRM address. For growing and successful merchants, you’re online store front is just one piece. Continuing to build the requisite infrastructure needed to handle the call center, latest shipping and billing information from your ERP system, and provide customer interaction history is an important step to ensure your company can scale effectively as online order volume grows.

To solve this issue Magento and SugarCRM are uniquely well paired. As Enterprise class open source applications, each provides the architectural framework to allow these two systems to be tightly integrated so whether you’re taking orders online, on the phone, in the store, or all 3, your customer service team can have one common view and representation of all that is occurring for that customer and your business.

Levementum, as the world’s largest SugarCRM partner, and Magento’s 2011 Emerging Partner of the year, has experience in bringing these two heavy weight champions together in an integrated solution set.

Levementum helped Valtim Marketing Solutions achieve this success by integrating SugarCRM and Magento Enterprise Edition to accommodate all customer touch points.  You can read the brief Valtim Marketing Solutions Success Story for additional information on how this integration helped Valtim achieve the customer and sales success they were looking for with a completely integrated end-to-end solution.

Continue reading »]]> A few questions to consider:

• Is your company one of many that sells not only direct to consumers, but also through partners, affiliates, and/or distribution channels?
• Have you discussed expanding your web presence to capture more online sales but held off because you view your direct to consumer (B2C) business too small to invest in?
• Are you looking to find ways to lower the operational costs (or cost of sales) with supporting your channel sales model to allow investment in other growth areas?
• What about giving your existing sales force the ability to service a larger number of clients, particularly new and smaller ones, without having to invest the same amount of sales time and effort?

One of the recent trends we see is companies that typically sell their goods and services through channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) are looking to augment their traditional field or inside sales model with a more robust ecommerce solution.  For B2B companies, it is common to multiple price lists per customer or customer tier, separate or even bonded inventory, and alternate payment terms and purchasing rules for their different sets of channel partners.

As these companies continue to grow, the cost of expanding their customer base through traditional means not only becomes cost ineffective, but it often results in declining customer value because the typical sales person can only support a certain number of target customers through manual processes.

Enter eCommerce solutions and Magento Enterprise. The Magento solution stack provides the framework for taking all levels of complexities per account or account type, and simplifying them into set or repeatable and high automated workflows that are integrated directly to your ERP system.

This system integration allows for consistent, up to date pricing, inventory levels and lead times, as well as greater customer self-sufficiency.

Levementum was able to create this efficiency for Troxell.  To read more about how this solution helped Troxell and their customers by utilizing eCommerce technology to enable the next level of scale and growth for their sales force, read Troxell’s brief Solution Summary or the complete White Paper.

Continue reading »]]> X.commerce looks to provide the framework to solve the problems many businesses run into when they find themselves with systems integrated from a series of batch jobs or home grown systems. It is the grand vision that a registration on any of these systems could propagate in real time to other systems, and provide a truly universal view of a customer regardless of the means of interaction.

In the fall of 2011, Magento announced its x.commerce initiative to the world at the Innovate Conference. More precisely, Ebay announced x.commerce with Magento Enterprise Edition at its core. In its recent Imagine Conference in April of 2012, Magento provided a deeper look into this roadmap and what it means to the business customer.

Today, most mid to large companies have significant investments in eCommerce, ERP, CRM, Customer Service tools, and other point solutions which have been assembled from best of breed suppliers over the years.  Some of these solutions are eventually integrated together via a series of batch jobs, and perhaps even real time interfaces using SOAP or REST. Often these integrations are limited and are cobbled together over several years. Still, it’s not uncommon for many to sit in their own silos, requiring manual rekeying of information between systems that results in errors, process breakdowns, and lower productivity within the enterprise.

What x.commerce is being positioned to offer is a method to tie many new era, often open source solutions, together through a common set of integration interfaces and protocols that allows companies to deploy and leverage a truly integrated set of tools that are linked as a means of planned and maintained architecture.

Consider the following scenario:

1. A customer registers on your website to look at products. They view items, perhaps add a few to their cart, but do not complete a purchase.
2. The customer then calls in to get information on a promotional program he or she saw. To assist in this, the call center rep has to create a contact record with a call note in a CRM tool.
3. The customer places an order via the phone, or perhaps via a catalog, resulting in a customer record being created in the ERP system as well. Now there is an order in ERP tied to a customer’s ‘master’ record which neither the ecommerce nor call center solution (often CRM) know about.
4. Now the customer calls in with a question about their order, the support representative has to first figure out how the order was placed, look it up in ERP, and then create a call tracking record in the CRM to keep track of the findings should the customer call again.  Yet, the eCommerce site knows nothing of this.
5. Now, the customer wants to go back online and either check their existing order, which he or she can’t, or better yet, place a new order. That order often results in the creation of another customer record in ERP and CRM unless you’ve built out integrations between all 3 systems.

For sales, marketing and support – the benefit is obvious.  For the IT professional… we can only hope the vision is realized.

What are your thoughts? What other benefits do you see x.commerce providing?

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At Levementum, we understand that in order to reach and serve customers today, retailers need an eCommerce presence. There is a wealth of opportunity for companies who create an eCommerce site that is designed from the ground up to engage customers and turn browsers to buyers. Magento, one of Levementum’s selected solution partners, is a leading developer in eCommerce software. Together we want to share what Magento can offer your business.

We invite you to be our guest at the Arizona eCommerce Forum on Thursday, September 29. During this event you will learn about the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world – Magento Enterprise – and all of the features that will help you attract more customers, improve customer loyalty, increase your average order value and maximize conversion rates.

Levementum will share how we created a modern, user-friendly online store using Magento Enterprise for Troxell Communications, the largest privately owned audio-video equipment distributor in the U.S. The new system made online shopping easy for Troxell customers, allowed them to penetrate new markets and provided seamless integration on the back-end with their existing systems including an Appx ERP system.

Register HERE today, space is LIMITED!

AGENDA

Thursday, September 29

9 – 9:30 am: Check-in and Breakfast

9:30 am – 12:00 pm: Magento presentation & Demonstration

Levementum Case Study

Q&A, Networking

Location

55 N. Arizona Place Suite 101

Chandler, AZ 85225

Although this event is FREE, you must register as space is limited.

Continue reading »]]> As we trudge through the weak economy looking for ways to attract new clients and grow our business, the old Marketing 101 adage comes to mind:

“Your best new customers are the customers you already have”

At Levementum, we’re finding that this rings true in an amazing way.

With our SugarCRM, Compiere, and Magento Open Source service offerings, we’re finding that the hit rate (on new Open Source apps) for customers that previously have implemented one of these outstanding products, is well over 50%…an amazing rate of Opportunity conversion.

Why is that?  I think its a reflection of how these clients have crossed their own chasms relative to the key “Objections” raised in the course of a Commercial Open Source sale.

When we talk to a new customer – one that has never implemented an Open Source product at an enterprise level, the four concerns we tend to see are:

1. Concerns about the Project/Company viability.

2. Concerns about support and SLA.

3. Concerns about Intellectual Property rights of derivative works.

4. Concerns about quality and features.

Clearly these objections are colored in the spirit of Open Source as a “new” and “disruptive” force, and customers have to be carefully navigated through these discussions.

The key  is, once the bridge has been crossed with one application project, the propensity to steamroll through these objections on the following application project is very high.

We’re finding that SugarCRM customers love Compiere…Compiere customers love what SugarCRM has to offer, and we’re also seeing an interest in Magento from customers of both SugarCRM and Compiere.  Again I propose its because they’ve already taken the Open Source plunge – and already subscribe to the unparallelled value proposition that they can take advantage of:

1. Control of Your Own Destiny.

2. Cost Benefit and TCO.

3. The Quality factor (as a strength)

We’re hoping to continue to see more and more progress – its a bet Levementum has made in spades – and why we continue on our path to being at the forefront of service firms that help Enterprises make sense of how to deploy broad Open Source solutions as an enabler for their own value propositions.

We’re in exciting times in the world of Open Source…The strength of the community has been, well, the community!  I see the opportunity for the SugarCRMs, Compieres and Magentos of the world to cross pollinate – share customers – share ideas – define boundaries – maximize opportunity value.  Its a win win for everybody, mostly for our customers .